25 May 2015

Evelyn Reed is the author of
the 1975 book “Woman’s Evolution”. Unfortunately it is not on the Internet.
“Women - Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex” (1970), the essay attached and linked
below, contains some of the ideas that were included in the longer work.

Our
picture today is of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space,
from the Soviet Union, on 16 June 1963.

Reed writes of “the downfall of women”
as if it was a single historic event, which, from the point of view of the
“metropolitan” or advanced capitalist countries, it appears to be. Of course
Reed was aware, like Engels,
that there were still contemporary societies existing on earth which had not yet
experienced, or fully experienced, the
full downfall
of women. The downfall has in practice been a long cascade, which is not yet at
an end.

The downfall of women
is real. It corresponds exactly with the arrival of class-divided society, with
its institutions of the patriarchal family, private property and state power.
This is what Engels expressed so clearly in 1884, following on from the work of
Henry Morgan and Karl Marx. Evelyn Reed does not contradict Engels, but her
work opened up the story in more detail.

In “Woman’s Evolution” Reed shows how nearly all the productive
technologies that humans still use today for basic survival, from horticulture
and animal husbandry to pottery, weaving and leatherwork, and including
building, and the use of fire, originated in the sphere of the women, which was
the human settlement itself.

In this short essay, Reed makes the basic case for the historical and
materialist view of human life, from which proceeds an integrated understanding
of the entire society of men and women together, and the consequent necessity
for socialism. After that, she contrasts and compares with some of her
contemporary opponents of forty years ago, whose arguments were similar to
those of the bourgeois feminists of today in South Africa. Here are some
excerpts from the essay:

“Under the clan
system of the sisterhood of women and the brotherhood of men there was no more
possibility for one sex to dominate the other than there was for one class to
exploit another. Women occupied the most eminent position because they were the
chief producers of the necessities of life as well as the procreators of new
life.”

“Woman’s overthrow went
hand in hand with the subjugation of the mass of toiling men to the master
class of men.”

“Women, then, have been condemned to their oppressed
status by the same social forces and relations which have brought about the
oppression of one class by another, one race by another, and one nation by
another. It is the capitalist system - the ultimate stage in the development of
class society - which is the fundamental source of the degradation and
oppression of women.”

“…to say that women
form a separate caste or class must logically lead to extremely pessimistic
conclusions with regard to the antagonism between the sexes in contrast with
the revolutionary optimism of the Marxists. For, unless the two sexes are to be
totally separated, or the men liquidated, it would seem that they will have to
remain forever at war with each other. As Marxists we have a more realistic and
hopeful message. We deny that women’s inferiority was predestined by her
biological makeup or has always existed.”